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A Kansas City Children’s Hospital Gets Smooth, Dynamic Audio from Compact Renkus-Heinz ICC 48/3 Loudspeakers

Located in Kansas City, a local children’s hospital is home to a comprehensive pediatric medical center integrating clinical care and medical education for patients ages birth to 21. As part of the extensive teaching and research programs, the hospital built a new facility to foster innovative medical education.

Within the campus is a 350-seat, state-of-the-art, multi-use auditorium for a range of presentations, lectures, large video conferencing meetings and more. To complement the space’s impressive design, the hospital worked with St. Louis-based technology systems integrator, Coltrane Systems, to design and install the primary audio support system. When it came to ensuring crisp, clear audio for the auditorium, Coltrane trusted Renkus-Heinz to bring the sound solution.

Renkus-Heinz digitally steerable loudspeaker solutions allow integrators to put sound where it’s wanted: on the audience. Further, the solutions come in multiple sizes, configurations, and color options — ensuring they will fit and blend into any challenging space.

Mike Dolan, Director of AV for Coltrane Systems said the benefits of Renkus-Heinz were critical for the hospitals new space as there were very specific parameters set out by the architect that the AV system needed to follow.

“It’s an amazing space, and our primary challenge was keeping the ceiling and the entire space very clean,” Dolan said. “We were free to design and propose whatever we thought best, but the ceiling was off limits, and all the audio had to be as discreet as possible, and hopefully, virtually invisible. Knowing we needed a high-caliber audio system with a small footprint, my first call was to our partners at Renkus-Heinz to help us understand the available options.”

The auditorium features a 23.81-foot x 13.41-foot screen built flush into the front wall with almost no space on either side. With traditional speaker hangs not an option, Dolan selected Renkus-Heinz Iconyx Compact Series 48/3 speakers that could be wall-mounted inside the small but tall space available on each side of the screen.

The ICC 48/3 offers additional solutions for integrators seeking flexible and powerful options in “medium-sized” installations. With an amplifier and DSP channel for each driver, the flexibility of Iconyx is now available in a package with a nearly 40 percent smaller footprint than the classic Iconyx.

“The ICC 48/3 system fit the needs of the space perfectly,” Dolan said. “We now have thin columns on each edge of the screen that are 13-feet tall but only about 5.5-inches wide. They essentially disappear. The architects about fell out of their chairs because they didn’t think we could come back with something that sounded so good and fit the space so perfectly — it met exactly what they were trying to accomplish.”

The Iconyx Compact Series design is available in four variants, ranging from 3.3ft (1m) to 13ft (4m). The longer columns provide excellent low-frequency control, an important consideration for applications where reverberation times peak at low frequencies. The longer columns also project coherent, highly intelligible sound for longer distances, negating the need for labor-intensive distributed systems in many applications.

“The architect and the customer — and us frankly — are all thrilled with the results,” Dolan said. “You don’t know the speakers are there unless you know what you’re looking for. The audio is smooth and dynamic and carries to the back of the room in exactly the fashion we expected it to. We couldn’t be happier. It sounds amazing. Renkus-Heinz delivers true, genuine sound, and the compact ICC system is an absolutely perfect solution for this application.”

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